I think that the deterrent is Taiwan destroying all their fabs before the Chinese get to them. This would severely affect the _entire_ world therefore there are strong incentives to keep Taiwan independent.
I still can't get used to it. It's totally creepy. Every time I'm out in public, it feels like the old movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where 99% of the people have been replaced with alien, but physically exact, replicas. And they're all just zombied out on their phones. It's an addiction that's run through the population completely wild and unaddressed. Often dangerously, scrolling messages while driving 75mph down the freeway. I used to host movie night, but we stopped because 5 minutes into the movie people were just ignoring the movie scrolling Instagram. You can do that at home, guys, jeez.
I don't know if you feel this, but there's also a sort of social pressure where if I'm in a situation and everyone's on their phones, it's hard for me to start up a conversation with someone since they seem 'focused' on whatever they're looking at. So I inevitably take out my own phone.
While I think you're right, your sentiment tends to be used to justify a lot of the bad stuff that is outweighed. "Humanity" is a vague target and can somehow be doing great even when we have plenty of human rights abuses, climate change, economic exploitation, etc.. (If this sounds political, consider that people bring up politics when they wish for power, or rather, change.) Well, most of us on HN are probably going to be in the up-and-up part of humanity no matter what, so there's that, but I don't think that should be the end of the discussion. Please consider that you do not speak for humanity. For that matter, neither do I. Humanity is all of us, not a statistical estimate for someone's purpose. If you feel a certain way about anything, great, but there are likely people who are justified in disagreeing.
> This is only because they still haven't bothered to update
I'd argue the opposite. As cars are largely and increasingly controlled by software, these issues have as much if not more effect than a lot of mechanical recalls.
It's honestly a bit forward-thinking that given this software fixes are also classified as recalls.
They update by interpreting new situations with logical extensions of the existing rules.
NHTSA can order a "recall" for a safety defect, would people prefer they say that car makers can't satisfy a "recall" order except by returning the car to the location it was built?
Karpathy, Carmack, Andreesen, Jensen, Dawkins and others who know him IRL say the same. It's endlessly curious how people who don't know him are confident they know better.
Yep. This came out in that recent issue with him hiring someone to play a game. As I recall, he got called out for it by some streamer, and Elon ended up blocking him.
Many people who work under him say he’s the worst kind of seagull boss imaginable: swoops in, understands nothing, fires people for funsies, gives unreasonable orders, and leaves. Don’t be around when Musk is at the office is a common refrain.
But yeah, I’m sure he presents himself well to his C-suite “peers.”
Who specifically? Could you name names? Or are you going to ask us to believe without evidence that the guy who got FIVE mega-Unicorns off the ground (3 of them "impossible") "understands nothing"?
That's actually pretty good evidence he understands nothing.
Either he's the faster learner in the history of mankind or he actually knows very little about his _10_ companies, 14 children, and countless other video game accounts.
He has a degree in Physics, that is like half of any engineering curriculum. Before funding SpaceX he hired several industry consultants to educate him, indicate aerospace engineering textbooks to study, etc. And then he had about 6 years of experience as almost full time CTO and CEO of SpaceX, until he had to divide his attention with Tesla. And somehow, after he and the SpaceX team achieved what dozens of other teams with more funding failed, he "understands nothing"? No need to be "the faster learner in the history of mankind".
Someone being capable in one field doesn't means he isn't a insufferable jerk or a moron in other fields. I don't understand this impulse to paint someone as completely black or completely white.
Consensus seems to be that he has some kind of a dual degree (obtained simultaneously) which includes B.S. in economics and a B.A.(!) in physics. That A would imply that he probably took the easier physics related classes (and probably not that many in total given the 2 degrees for 1 thing).
Regardless, a bachelor degree hardly means much anyway...
Is there any indication that he's a particularly (or at all) talented engineer (software or any other field)? I mean, yeah, I agree that it doesn't really matter or change much. Just like Jobs had better/more important things (not being sarcastic) to do than directly designing hardware or writing software himself.
I don't know how B.S. and B.A. degrees work, but apparently that B.A. in physics was enough for him be accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University.
He also "held two internships in Silicon Valley: one at energy storage startup Pinnacle Research Institute, which investigated electrolytic supercapacitors for energy storage, and another at Palo Alto–based startup Rocket Science Games."[1] , has some software patents (software patents should be abolished) from his time at Zip2, and made and sold a simple game when he was twelve.
So he has a little experience working directly at the low level with his physics degree and coding knowledge, but of course it was not his talent in those that made him a billionaire, it might even have been the opposite. So there is indication for the "at all" but not on how talented. I guess one versed in BASIC can read the source of his game, but that was when he was twelve...
But yeah, nowadays he has thousands of engineers working under him, of course he is going to delegate. The the important thing is the system engineering, making sure the efforts are going in the right direction and well coordinated. He seems knowledgeable and talented enough at that. Evidence for SpaceX: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
> I don't know how B.S. and B.A. degrees work, but apparently that B.A. in physics was enough for him be accepted to a graduate program in materials science at Stanford University.
Is there any conclusive evidence either way? IIRC he allegedly got into graduate program 2 years before getting his 2 B.S. / B.A.?
Don't let the facts get in the way of the "Musk is a midwit who just stumbles into founding trillion dollar companies" story. ;) It's an article of faith for these people.
I'm not sure how Musk not being anywhere close to being a talented engineer or scientist somehow diminishes his extreme success in other fields? That seems mostly orthogonal.
Having a PhD. or any field is relatively ordinary and not that impressive on the grand scale of thing. Founding several extremely successful tech/etc. companies is on a whole other level. Being a horrible software engineer (as his public action/communication on the topic would imply) seems entirely insignificant and hardly relevant when he has much more important things to do.
Of course other with comparable achievements (e.g. like Jobs who I don't think ever claimed that he was a talented engineer) weren't even as remotely insecure or narcissistic as him.
You are making a big logical jump here. I only gave one company as example because that is enough to disprove your previous post.
Also, before you thought he knew very little about his many companies, implying no distinction, but now you adjusted up his knowledge about two companies, but inexplicably down for the others.
You also imply he should give equal attention to all of them, ignoring some of them are bigger, more important, or simply more interesting to him. Is equal attention the optimal strategy here, or you would be getting an F grade if you suggested that?
He didn't need to invest a lot of time to make a good investment in DeepMind, that was then bought by Google, for example. Investing in what you know and understand is a good investment advice, but so is to diversify your portfolio and to not spend too much time optimizing your investments in lieu of everything else.
Some of his "investments" are more like spending on a hobby (as destructive as it can be, in the case of twitter for example... or constructive like SpaceX), so not even bound by those rules...
Can confirm via anecdata: some people have always seen him as the narcissist child he is, and have proactively avoided reporting to him in any capacity. A few years ago I found this perplexing and hyperbolic. Boy was I wrong.
You can list lots of people who haven't suffered his wrath. But that's not evidence, that's lack of evidence. I can provide you with someone who does have his phone number and does know him and says something quite different[1]. There's a litany of examples of Musk deliberately endangering people he's decided to go to war with - whether that's spurious accusations of pedophilia or forcing a former employee to go into hiding.
Today I saw a twitter interaction between, of all people, Ross Douthat and Scott Alexander. Two very bright and interesting thinkers with wildly divergent points of view, discussing ideas with courtesy
As far as I can tell, Mastodon was briefly hyped on HN but nobody actually uses it. Bluesky seems to have a few people within a fairly narrow political range. Truth social is just for Trump. Reddit is pseudoanonymous as is HN. Instagram is for sharing photos not ideas or links. TikTok is a Skinner box.
I ask this as someone who genuinely doesn't know how to use the internet anymore. Reddit used to be useful but is now a cesspool. LinkedIn is a weird place where we all post like Stepford wives for our employers. The twitter-clones all feel a bit like using a paper straw to fight climate change.
I know there are semi-private slack groups and discord channels out there, but I don't know how to find or join them and it seems like a hassle to follow.
Basically, for me, no one I pay attention to posts anywhere any more.
Mastodon is great, but non-algorithmic, so it only gets good after you explore and follow more people who are interesting. Garbage in-garbage out. I find it very high signal to noise and full of interesting people. Bluesky is where people go to talk to an audience, mastodon or fediverse people tend to be more conversational.
BlueSky is the new up-and-comer. I am enjoying it, but I unfollow anyone that posts ragebait or political content (besides memes, some of those are pretty funny).
Jack even said so when Twitter originally took off. He was excited to see how 140 chars forced people to shape their thoughts.
Everyone is tired of it. That’s why the formerly popular social media sucks now.
The entire economy in the US is built around behavioral economics experimentation, A/B test, measuring retail behavior and putting options in front of retail shoppers.
You sound like an another exhausting American. Rather than find community through self guided journey you just want it handed to you, like a religion.
To have an equivalent fatality rate per passenger-mile, you'd need about 7,500 commercial aviation fatalities in the US per year (two and a half 9/11s, ~60 fully loaded 737s).
Per hour would be lower of course, maybe 1/10th as many just judging by "cruise speed." I couldn't find good hour-wise data.
